Happy mothers day in detention

By Invitation of Homeland Security, these moms are in fact going through Mother's Day with their youngsters in lockup.

In a perfect world, Moms ought to go through Mother's Day with their youngsters.

These moms are doing that, yet in conditions that are a long way from perfect: Moms and their children crushed together in frosty, clammy cells in an administration run confinement office, a dull and troubling spot where mother and youngster are given inadequate proportions and denied the privilege to insight, and where mothers are left no decision yet to go on yearning strikes trying to attract regard for the ill-use they're enduring.

Where's this happening? Russia? China? North Korea? Should we begin a universal crusade to weight an outside government, or raiding posses, or human carrying cartels to make the best decision? #FreeTheMoms?

Think closer to home. This phenomenon — moms in detention — is
happening here in the United States, in federal facilities located in
states like Texas and New Mexico.
These women and children are
being effectively kept as prisoners, even though they don’t have lawyers
or charges lodged against them. This kind of lockup sounds like such a
dreadful punishment. What terrible crime did they commit?
They
believed. They crossed into the United States last summer — along with
more than 80,000 uninvited guests, almost entirely other women and
children from Central America — because they believed what they had
heard about how the United States was a safe haven for refugees fleeing
oppression, death, horror.

Central America has all of the above,
especially in recent years now that violent youth gangs and drug cartels
are warring for control of countries like Honduras, Guatemala, and El
Salvador. It’s the kind of place where young girls are sexually
assaulted, and young boys are recruited into gangs with an offer they
can’t refuse: join up or watch your family die.

It’s the kind of place
where mothers scrape their fingers bloody rubbing rosary beads as they
pray to the saints to keep their children safe. Over the last couple of
years, thousands of mothers have grabbed their children and a few
personal belongings and headed north, through Mexico and into the United
States across the Texas border.
Here’s what we know from news accounts, government records, and the testimony of refugees themselves.

The
first wave, which arrived approximately between October 2013 and April
2014, took U.S. immigration officials by surprise. And so, the first
instinct was to get rid of them by doing what the law allows —
transferring them into the custody of U.S.-based relatives with a notice
to appear before an immigration judge at some future date. Many of
those who were released in this fashion never showed for their court
appearance and instead blended into the sizable population of
undocumented immigrants in the United States.

Of course, there is
no excuse for failing to appear—even though, in some well-publicized
cases, the assigned court was more than 1000 miles from where the
defendant was located. The point is that, once these refugees were
released from custody, it was easy for them to disappear. Perhaps the
authorities saw this as a mistake that they didn’t want to repeat with
the waves that followed.

The final wave, which arrived after September 2015, were immediately
arrested and deported back to their home countries in a showy and
well-organized repatriation effort intended to send a message to the
people who still lived there and might have been contemplating a journey
of their own to the United States: “Don’t come. You will be apprehended
and sent home.” Before long, the flow of refugees from families from
Central America dried up to a trickle.

In between those two waves —
of those who were let go and those who were sent home — was the middle
wave of refugees, those who arrived approximately between April and
August 2014. These are the people who came in droves, the ones you saw
on the news steaming across the Texas-Mexico border last summer.

Ever
wonder what happened to them? Many of them were apprehended and,
instead of being deported, they were placed in makeshift detention
facilities. For a time, even some abandoned military bases were
converted to house these refugee families. More recently, they have been
placed in federal detention facilities. And forgotten.
There are
activists who have traveled to the towns where these centers are based
and tried to gain access to the detainees. When they can provide
humanitarian aid, they do.

I spoke to one activist who has made
the pilgrimage, and who is himself undocumented. He believes that these
centers need to shut down because of what allegedly occurs there.
One
of the more notorious detention facilities is the Karnes County
Residential Center, located about 100 miles south of Austin.

In October,
several immigration advocacy groups fired off a letter to Immigration
and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security, which
hired a for-profit prison operator to run the facility. The groups
allege that women are being sexually abused and otherwise mistreated by
guards at the facility. The company, Geo Group Inc., denies the
allegations and insists that the Karnes Center “provides a safe, clean,
and family-friendly environment for mothers and children.”

You’ll find liberals who are concerned about closing the military
prison at Guantanamo Bay but who are not comparably worked up over, for
instance, what’s happening to women and children at institutions like
Karnes.
You have to hand it to the Obama administration. In the
last six-and-a-half years, it has racked up a record 2 million
deportations and divided hundreds of thousands of families. Now team
Obama has finally found a way to keep families intact: just lock up
mothers and children together in makeshift family prisons.

And
now, the administration has come up with a Mother’s Day present for the
thousands of immigrant women, and children it has incarcerated in
detention facilities: a slap in the face.
The gift was delivered
not by courier but by lawyers, which is rarely a good sign. The
lawyers, who work at the Justice Department, have maintained that the
child refugees being held in detention don’t have a due process right to
counsel under the Constitution. And so they asked U.S. District Court
Judge Thomas Zilly to dismiss in its entirety a lawsuit challenging the
Obama administration’s policy of rushing thousands of incarcerated
children into deportation proceedings without first giving them legal
representation. The judge refused to do so.

The attorneys recently requested that Zilly stay all further court
action on the due process claims of these women and children until
Justice can appeal his ruling. The judge has said that the
right-to-counsel claim is too important to be put off much longer. A
decision on the request for a stay should be forthcoming.
It
seems like a lot of trouble for the U.S. government to go to, all so it
can do as it pleases with people who are weak and vulnerable — child
refugees, most of whom don’t speak English or understand what’s
happening to them.

This is not the Obama administration’s finest
hour. It stands taller when it defends immigrants and refugees, not when
it is going to such extraordinary lengths to remove them or turning a
blind eye to those who are alleged to have abused them.
As for
those Justice Department lawyers, well, you have to wonder how they
sleep at night. This is why they went to law school? This is how they’re
using their legal training—trying to deny representation to a bunch of
kids?
Their own mothers must be very proud.